


to build a future

by HereComeDatBoi



Series: you're the one that's making me strong [22]
Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Domestic Fluff, Fluff, Humor, M/M, Making Up, Married Adam/Shiro (Voltron), Mild Angst
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-24
Updated: 2019-10-24
Packaged: 2021-01-02 07:13:41
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,503
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21157697
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HereComeDatBoi/pseuds/HereComeDatBoi
Summary: Shiro, Adam, and the question of parenthood.





	to build a future

_ “So that implant would go...where, again?” _

_ “The first one would attach to one of your larger blood vessels,” Matt said patiently, pointing to the holographic teaching model shining in the middle of the room. “That one, near your liver. It diverts blood out of your own circulatory system through this half and carries it to the pod’s placental substitute with a wormhole, and after the oxygen and nutrients diffuse into the baby’s blood it comes back into that vein through the other half. They’re side by side, see? One segment attached to that artery, and one to the vein.” _

_ “It sounds simple enough,” Adam frowned. “And it’ll really work?” _

_ “We’ve tested out the wormhole implants already, in burn victims,” explained Colleen. “They’re the standard of treatment here and at the Maricopa hospital now, though we haven’t exactly been forthcoming about how they work. One implant goes into the bone marrow, and another into the dermal layer somewhere they’re not injured―sometimes even a family member’s dermal layer―and with the new stem cells and skin cells coming into the wound, we can usually minimize scarring and make sure the patient heals about three times faster than normal.” _

_ “What about the other one?” said Shiro, eyeing the smaller of the two titanium implants with an anxious crease in his forehead. There was more scaultrite fitted into this one, sparkling dully under the light of the hologram, and for some reason the sight of it sent a chill up Shiro’s spine. “Where does it go?” _

_ “It’s been measured to fit over Adam’s heart, like the siphon Liu designed for the Atlas. The pod and the implants run on quintessence, so―” _

_ Matt went off into another long-winded explanation, but Shiro heard nothing of it. Somehow the cheerful office seemed to have melted away, and in its place was a chamber with a domed ceiling and a high glass vault gleaming below it, a vault with polished sides and a clear panel parting its contents from the world―and a young man lying beneath it, with a siphon sparkling blue and white on his breast and his hands folded over his stomach―a young man who would not wake no matter how desperately Shiro called to him, and then― _

_ “We can’t,” he said abruptly, closing his eyes and clenching his jaw so tightly that his teeth began to ache. “No quintessence siphons. I watched one stop his heart barely two years ago, and he’s not going through that again. I won’t allow it.” _

_ “Takashi―Takashi, love, it’s not going to be like before! Look at me, darling, I promise―” _

_ “This isn’t up for discussion, Adam. We both need to agree, and this is me _ not _ agreeing. Matt, Mrs. Holt―I’m so sorry we’ve wasted your time, but I...I can’t do this. I can’t.” _

* * *

Adam was silent on the ride home, sitting without moving a muscle in the passenger seat of their old Garrison-issue jeep and staring out the window at the desert slipping by to their right. Shiro kept turning away from the road to look at him, valiantly trying to ignore the trembling of his lips at the thought of his husband being upset with him―but tonight it was far more than a thought, for Adam’s tanned fist was wound into a pale, bloodless knot on his knee, and Shiro could sense the fury coming off him in waves as they pulled into the parking lot under their apartment complex. 

He poked at the power button and sighed as Adam settled himself facing even more firmly away, and then Adam was gone―_ kicking _the door open and rushing upstairs to their flat before stuffing the keys into the doorknob and vanishing into the living room. 

Shiro closed his eyes and sat there for a while with his head resting on the steering wheel, wondering if he had gone too far―if the decision had even been _ his _to make, given that Adam would be the one sustaining their hypothetical children for the nine or so months they needed the incubation pod. But Adam had never possessed even an ounce of self-preservation, and the past thirteen years were proof enough of that; even before the war his husband had been reckless to the point of putting himself in danger for no good reason at all, and after the Atlas it seemed as if he had forgotten that there was anyone left to grieve for him if anything went wrong. 

_ And whose fault was that? _ said a spiteful little voice in the back of Shiro’s mind. _ Who was the one who left him and brought him into the war in the first place? Who’s the reason he ended up in that vault? Who’s the reason he _ died _ in it? _

“I _ know _,” he muttered, getting out of the car and shoving his hands into his pockets as he started up towards the apartment. “It’s all my fault, but he’s going to live. He has to live and be happy, no matter what.”

_ He’s wanted a child since before you went away. You couldn’t give him one then, because you were sick, and now you’re taking the chance to be a father away from him again? Because you think you know what’s best? _

“It’s for his own good,” Shiro sighed, wrapping his arms around himself as he reached the top of the stairs and pushed open the door. Adam was nowhere to be seen; both their bedroom and the room that had once been Keith’s were dark, and the kitchen was dismally empty when he passed by to leave his keys on the table; but Adam’s phone and wallet were lying beside it, the phone at one end of the table and the wallet sprawled on the other side as if they had just been tossed there.

He thought for a moment about going to comfort Adam, or at least trying to reason with him―but fear and frustration won out, as they tended to do, so instead he found himself standing at the kitchen counter and chopping butternut squash for soup. It was January, after all, and Adam had never quite grown accustomed to Arizona winters; he still dabbed on bug spray before leaving the house on December mornings, still half-expecting to come back covered in mosquito bites even though no one at the Garrison had seen a mosquito in years. By night he slept under so many blankets that Shiro made a sort of game of wading through them all to find him, and too often when he touched his husband’s hand beneath the covers it was still cold―so he slipped in beside him and pulled Adam close to his chest, drawing the quilts and comforters over their heads with only a small gap between the pillows to keep the air from getting too stuffy. 

“Why do you never tell me when you’re cold?” he would whisper, pulling Adam’s fingers close to his lips and blowing on them. “You know it doesn’t matter what I’m doing. I’ll always come to sit with you.”

“I know, honey,” Adam would smile in return, kissing his nose and chin and forehead by the light of one of their datapads, lost somewhere in the sea of fleece and cotton that their bed always became after autumn. “Maybe I just like it when you find me like this.”

He thought for a moment of what nights like this one might be like with a baby sleeping between them―a baby who hated the cold as much as her Shindolan father did and loved _ okonomiyaki _ as dearly as her Japanese _ otou-san, _who would complain when her parents kissed each other and demand that they kiss her instead, who would pout when she first tried Shiro’s squash soup and then smile like the sun itself and decide that she liked it enough to eat a second helping. 

_ No child of mine would ever turn up her nose at your cooking, Takashi. She’d know how good it is right away―she’ll be half of me, after all. _

_ What would a child of ours even look like? _ he wondered, throwing a diced onion into Adam’s best stockpot with four spoonfuls of butter and a sprinkling of salt and pepper. It was never something he dared to think of, really―but as he knelt down to search the vegetable basket for garlic he knew somehow that his and Adam’s daughter would have Adam’s red-copper skin, dull in some lights and warm in others, as well as Adam’s face―Adam’s lips and delicate nose and Adam’s almond eyes, though _ hers _would be grey like Shiro’s and his own father’s before him. 

_ I can do it, sweetheart! I made a battleship _ sentient_ , for Heaven’s sake―a baby wouldn’t be even half as difficult, and you know it. _

“But what if it _ would? _” Shiro murmured aloud, brushing the garlic into the pot with the onions. “I lost you twice, and I can’t, not again―”

Suddenly he was back in the power hold of the Atlas, staring down into the vault that had become Adam’s tomb as Keith and Lance grabbed his arms and tried to drag him away―but not before he realized that the cushions beneath his husband's thin body were soaked with blood, or that something was _ wrong _ in the pallor of his face―that there was no pulse, no heartbeat, that the screen that usually displayed Adam’s vitals was blank because _ there were no vitals to record― _

“Takashi?”

Shiro dropped his knife and turned around with a strangled gasp, putting a hand to his chest as Adam crept into the kitchen with his old tasselled shawl wrapped around his shoulders. For a moment Shiro stood blinking back tears, trying to banish the memory of the three days he spent as a widower just after the war ended, and then Adam put his arms around his waist and dropped his head onto his shoulder, sighing through the steam rising from the stockpot before kissing the back of his neck. 

“We don’t have to go forward with this,” Adam said at last, though from the white tooth-marks in his lips Shiro knew that Adam wanted to, so badly that he would have been willing and _ happy _ to risk his life for it if not for Shiro’s terror. “We can look into adoption, _ janu. _I’d love any child whether it was ours by blood or not―you know that, right?”

“I know. I know it firsthand,” whispered Shiro, closing his eyes and thinking of Adam at eighteen, filling a plate of warm pasta for a skinny twelve-year-old Keith and making a handwritten vitamin chart to stick to the front of his algebra binder. “You’d be the most amazing father, _ koiishi. _ You’d help our kids with all their science projects and get up at six in the morning to make them packed lunches for school like you did for me and Keith, and when they were sick you’d plop them into bed and stuff them with soup and hot tea until they willed themselves better so they wouldn’t have to be fussed over. You’d never say no to more bedtime stories until you fell asleep right in their nursery, and you’d teach yourself knitting even though you hate it just so each baby could have a handmade blanket of her own. I _ know _you would.”

“Her?” asked Adam, eyes softening at the thought. “You thought of a girl, didn’t you?”

“I did,” Shiro held him tighter. “And I know you really hate knitting, so I’ll learn, and make all the socks and hats and blankets. Is that okay?”

“More than,” chuckled his husband, stroking Shiro’s face with a calloused thumb and leaning in to kiss him again. “Should I drop a line to the Baptist home Keith used to live at, then? I don’t know that they’re any more tolerant of non-straight couples than they used to be, but they do have all our data on file, and the home-study…and they know Keith did well with us, so... ”

Shiro swallowed. 

“Actually,” he croaked, reaching out and extinguishing the flame under his pot of soup before it could burn. “If you―if you’re _ sure _you’re strong enough, we...we could have a baby with Matt and Katie’s pod? If you want to, and if you know you can handle it…”

In response Adam reached out and picked up one of the ugly metal cups that the previous tenants had left behind (Shiro usually used it as a measuring cup, when their actual measuring cups were dirty) and compacted it into a ball with his bare brown fingers, meeting Shiro’s eyes and raising his eyebrows before sticking his thumbs into it and forcing it back into something close to its original shape. 

“Sweetheart,” Adam told him, voice hiding a burst of laughter as the hidden crescents over his cheekbones flared up and glowed gold like the sun at daybreak, “I’m not even fully _ human _ anymore, remember? I raced the horses at the farm and won when we were on our honeymoon. And I’ve beaten Allura in the training room at least three or four times. You, sweet cyborg husband-of-mine, have yet to do so _ once. _”

“Oh,” Shiro said lamely, feeling suddenly foolish. “I forgot about that.”

“So you really want this? A baby, with me?”

“I never even thought about children before we moved in together,” he admitted. “But, um...after that, and before I got sick, I couldn’t _ stop _thinking about them.”

A beat of silence, and then―

“I wanted four,” Shiro sighed, blushing crimson as Adam’s eyes widened in delight. “You kept telling me how wonderful it was to grow up with two cousins and three sisters, and I was an only kid, so I wanted that for our children. I want them to have every kind of love there is―our love, friends’ love, their siblings’ love…”

“Then we’ll have four,” chuckled Adam. “But how about we start with just the one first? And dinner, since I could hear your stomach growling all the way from Keith’s room.”

“Keith’s room? What were you doing in there?”

“Checking to see if it would make a good nursery,” Adam shrugged. “And according to my expert judgment, it is.”

“You do know the baby isn’t going to use it, right? She’s going to sleep in our room.”

“That doesn’t mean she won’t like a cute bedroom when she’s older,” sniffed his husband. “Now lead the way to dinner, sweetheart. We’ll text Colleen in the morning.”

* * *

_ “Have you picked out a name, love?” _

_ “I was thinking of Ren for a boy, since we can’t know for sure yet, or Ryou after my dad. Do you have any for a girl?” _

_ “I’ve had our first daughter’s name picked out since I was sixteen, Takashi! Don’t you remember?” _

_ “Well, what is it? Our wedding rings say we’re going to have a girl anyway, so we’d better plan ahead.” _

_ “Sonia, _janu_. Sonia Shirogane.” _

  
  
  
  
  
  



End file.
